Many individuals and businesses occasionally have a need for printed materials such as party invitations, announcements of special events, holiday cards, or any number of other items. Rather than settle for off-the-shelf, generic designs, many customers for these types of products wish to personalize the product by incorporating personal images into the product design, such as photographs of family members or other images of particular interest or relevance to the customer.
Some of these individuals and businesses turn to traditional sources such as a local print shop for assistance in preparing customized materials. As an alternative, many people today choose to prepare their own custom designs using a Web-based printing service site, such as VistaPrint.com, that offers users the ability to access the site from the user's home or office and design a personalized product using document design tools and services provided by the site. Printing services Web sites typically provide their customers with the ability to select a desired product template from variety of pre-designed templates, incorporate text and images to create a customized design, and then place an order for production and delivery of a desired quantity of the product. Similar automated services are occasionally provided on-site at print or photo shops.
Prior online tools and techniques for incorporating user images into electronic designs generally fall into two broad categories. In some cases, the layout selected by the user for customization has been designed by the printing service provider to contain one or more defined image containers into which uploaded images will be placed. These image containers typically have fixed dimensions and a fixed position in the overall layout. In order to produce the selected layout with the user's images, only a fixed number of images may be implemented into the layout, and the images may need to be cropped or distorted to accommodate the defined image containers.
Another prior technique for allowing a user to incorporate images into a product design is to initially place all user-provided images at a default size at the same default location. This technique places the burden of manually resizing and repositioning images in the design completely on the user.
The aforementioned techniques for incorporating images into a product design have several disadvantages. In layouts having defined image containers, user preference is constrained by the number, size and aspect ratio of the image containers. If an ideal layout is not available, a user must tolerate a layout that displays more or fewer images than desired, or requires cropping or distorting some images to fit within the image containers. Conversely, techniques providing manual positioning controls are time-consuming for the user, and rely on the user to create a satisfactory design.